Mark Rothko Casts His Light on Paris
The FLV Exhibition, the Jason Farago Review, and the NYT Comments
I’ve seen a lot of superb museum shows over the past two weeks—Mike Kelley and Lee Lozano at the Bourse de Commerce-Pinault Collection, Van Gogh’s Auvers paintings at the d’Orsay, and Berthe Morisot at the Marmottan-Monet—but the exhibition worth flying to Paris for is the giant Rothko retrospective at Fondation Louis Vuitton. Featuring 115 paintings from all phases of Rothko’s career, the exhibition is beautifully mounted, easily navigated and thoughtfully audio guided by its curators, one of whom is Rothko’s son Christopher.
The paintings themselves are revelatory, even for those who’ve seen Rothko’s work in other places and, like me, thought they knew something about it. Part of the impact is the sheer number of works—room after room, arranged chronologically and hung low in spacious rooms, as the artist specified. I soon realized I had never seen more than three or four Rothkos at a time, and had known nothing of his early figurative and abstract work, before the color field paintings that made him famous. The biggest revelation was the light emitted by the dark red and black paintings—an astonishing effect of Rothko’s technique of layering many thin coats of paint. The paintings glow from within as if lit by lanterns, a feature notably absent in photographs and reproductions.
On Day 2, when I was there, the crowds were large (but not too big for the huge rooms) and rapturous. The only person who was unimpressed was a five-year-old English girl who kept saying “This is crazy” about the most colorful paintings. Everyone over the age of five was engrossed, and most seemed enthralled.
So it was with some annoyance that I read Jason Farago’s NYT Review, “Mark Rothko at Full Scale, and in Half Light” which damns the artist with faint praise, acknowledging “A lot of people find his large paintings consoling, or seek the Romantic sublime in the depths of his reds and violets”. And that’s just the beginning: after several harrumphing paragraphs about the wealth and power of LVMH’s CEO, Bernard Arnault, the richness of starchitect Frank Gehry’s architecture, and the current $40 million price tag for Rothko’s “misty abstractions”, Farago asks, “May I grumble for a moment?” Gee, go ahead! He then writes:
But there is a repetitiousness to this much Rothko, and a fair bit of pomposity to its metaphysical claims. For an artist with such a horror of the decorative, his classic phase is uncomfortably stylish, and feels all the more so in a museum funded by handbag sales.
Back and forth he goes, hating the Seagram Murals (a commission for the Four Seasons restaurant that Rothko canceled, as was his right) and declaring SFMOMA’s “No. 14” the star of the show. Why “No. 14”? Something about its blue, persimmon and purple hues, but no explanation of why that painting is better than others.
As always, the Comments Section provided additional insight. The pro-Rothkos outnumbered the anti-Rothkos exponentially, but what amused me was that none of the writers had actually seen the exhibition. Like the Canadians who write in to crow about their health care system every time the NYT runs an article on health care, they just had to weigh in. But to not see FLV’s Rothkos in person is to not see them at all, something only one person noted.